San Francisco prides itself on its oddness and idiosyncracy but for sheer freakishness, the city can't hold a candle to Los Angeles.
This is a place that has specialized in Christian Apocalypse Cults since the modern city began, with Aimee Semple MacPherson leading the way for a colorful lineage of fervent believers and hucksters.
In Redondo Beach, at a small strip mall containing one of the original Trader Joe's outlets in the world...
...an evangelist in a white suit and gold glitter tie hovers around his Jesus-mobile everyday...
...ready to spread the good news.
Earlier in the week in Santa Barbara, we stumbled across a large boat in the marina with WATERMANACADEMY.COM stenciled on its side and the name "Rapture" painted on its back. (Click here to get there, if you dare. The photos below are taken from the site.)
According to a "Counselor" in his 20's who we talked to, the boat was originally a research vessel that had been turned into an "adventure" vessel that could sleep 110 people in bunk beds. It was based out of San Diego and took frequent trips to Catalina Island, usually with 13-to-19-year-old boys.
They claim to take alienated teenage boys in hand, and at $6,000 for a three-week boot camp, they turn the boys into "men."
"I'll bet you it's a Christian Cult with a pinch of the paramilitary," I guessed to my friends and the website proved me correct.
Though I'm not interested in sex with teenagers and never have been (even when I was a teenager), the operation also reeked of NAMBLA-style homoeroticism.
To add to the general creepiness, Santa Barbara's own Hate Radio Celebrity, Dr. Laura herself, had just impressed the young men with her "courageous" rapelling down the side of the boat.
I must confess that much of Christian dogma strikes me as superfluous since it's so easy to see God where the ocean meets land.
Some people see God in the mountains...
...and others in the desert.
I tend to feel him/her/it while gliding through a warm wave.
Beaches are also wonderful places for children to play...
...beautifully...
...which does much to stave off that $6,000 alienation down the road.
A trio of institutions are closing up shop in the Civic Center this summer.
The bookstore with the excessive name, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books" on Van Ness Avenue, announced their closure one day at the end of June and started selling off everything in the store.
Though the official story was some nonsense about Amazon driving bookstores out of business, the unofficial story was that there was a divorce among longtime business partners.
The huge bookstore has been in the Opera Plaza location since the 1970s, and was famous for holding readings by every famous person in the world who ever wrote a book. If a list was ever published of the literary floggers over the years, it would be most impressive.
The staff was always a trifle rude but they were definitely knowledgeable and interesting and came up with heartfelt recommendations. They are all going to be missed.
A few blocks away in the Hayes Valley, another institution dating from the 1970s is set to close later this month.
The Blue Muse restaurant is an odd Continental Cuisine Restaurant and Bar owned by Sidney, who has always looked a bit like a Chinese Seiji Ozawa in his 70's Beatles haircut period.
He also owns a Chinese restaurant around the corner from The Blue Muse called "Sage," and the two restaurants not-so-secretly share the same kitchen and chefs.
The staffing was always a bit odd, a mixture of Sidney's immediate family (who we all got to see grow up into adulthood) and a collection of extraordinarily idiosyncratic gay waiters and bartenders, some of them saints and some of them bitches, though in truth they were often both.
The rent was raised by some incredible amount recently and Sidney has thrown in the towel. The place was an anachronism almost from its opening, but a completely charming one, and it didn't cost an arm and a leg to eat and drink there like its more trendy recent neighbors.
The saddest closing of all is John Swett grammar school on McAllister Street between Gough and Franklin.
The San Francisco school district needed to close a few schools due to declining citywide enrollment, although this particular school probably shouldn't have been on the closure list.
Though the powers that be have never actually admitted it in public, John Swett's closure was partly because the school district wanted to expand out of their offices across the street and take over the real estate for more bureaucracy.
It was a shameful act and everybody on the school board connected with the closure deserves public rebuke for the rest of their lives.
The school was a living place almost a century old, and kids seemed to love it there.
The daily playground commotion will be deeply missed.
A group of us also said goodbye to what I've been referring to as "Opera Summer Camp" when Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" had its final performance on a Sunday matinee.
The end of a theatrical production is usually a bittersweet affair.
The same group of people will never be together again once the show is over.
Still, the end of the season allows me to take a holiday to my boyhood beachtown haunts in Southern California, the Land of Gidget. I'll be sure to send a few digital postcards.
